


the secret to forgetting lies (the secret to you and me)

by meritmut



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, Post Winter-Soldier, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-02-03 01:10:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1725689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a house of cards in her head, a precarious thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In which Bucky is in recovery, and Nat is aware of most of her past except for his part in it.

The boy sleeps.

That, she almost envies him.

And she cannot help but call him _boy_ , now that she sees him without the coat and the mask and the damaged arm they have taken away to mend (the one piece of him they are certain that they can, though little good if they cannot save the rest of him). Unconscious, oblivious, the years fall away from him and he seems so much the younger, the weight of time slipping from his shoulders until he truly seems the age that he has – on the surface, at least – remained for decades.

He's like her, in that.

Like her in that the time has left no outward mark upon him, but where she had lived out all those years dodging death by the skin of her teeth, for the most part they've passed him by completely. Like her, he is both ageless and deathless, having slept through whole seasons of the world in the stasis chambers of the Academy.

_Deathless. There was a story, in her homeland, of a man without a death._

She’d read the file of Barnes before she handed it over, of course she had. She may be feeling her way, inch over inch, towards the light; toward the kind of person Rogers might find less reason to flinch from and she might find easier to face in the mirror each morning, but she is still the intelligence agent who breaks men for a living - who opens them up and picks them apart for the information they carry. And even if she were not, she is a creature of curiosity at heart, and if the frayed edges of her mind where questions still linger unanswered prickle when she looks at the sleeping form of the Winter Soldier, she will move heaven and earth to know why.

She had combed through the dossier for answers, and discovered all over again the methods that the Academy, and later HYDRA, had used to keep the American suspended. At the thought of those chambers she'd felt the nausea rise in her gut like a heavy tide, and felt too the ache of synapses searing themselves whole as a long-forgotten memory reignites...

She had seen those chambers with her own eyes, long ago. She has a fleeting thought of the freezing labs – of being where she should not have been, witnessing what she was never meant to see.

_He had slept, and Death had looked over him._

In the arms of that unnatural slumber the Winter Soldier had passed decades, because while the Red Room had found use for the both of them, it had not required more of its most covert weapon than the occasional mission and he was too unstable to keep him conscious – too valuable to be allowed independence. Natasha had been an asset, shaped and honed to serve her country, but Barnes had been little more than a tool bent toward a purpose and unleashed, and returned the cold when that purpose was fulfilled. She, at least, had _lived_.

True, it had been a long road, and hers to walk alone in parts. All those endless days and nights incarnadine, hers to live out until they blurred together in the end – there are great stretches of her life that she can barely recall, save for the taste of blood in her mouth and the rasp of steel beneath her fingernails and the _drive_ within her to push on (other parts she remembers more clearly. Other parts she will not allow herself to forget), but she knows that she has lived a life, even if parts of it have been scoured from her memory by force.

...The image in her mind, a flickering recollection of the Winter Soldier entombed in his frozen casket, falters like an incomplete circuit and all too soon Natasha is back in the present, wondering grimly what might trigger the connection to a memory she did not know she’d lost.

And how, too, the shadowy phantom of the Cold War can appear now so _diminished_.

She knows better, of course – knows that every fibre of him is lethal even sedated and stripped of his gear, but still he looks no more dangerous than any declawed predator, worn and battered, a mishandled thing thrown out from the devices of an older world than this to sleep away the days in a sterile room, smaller for the absence of all the trappings of his legend. Now that he is without them, separated from the dark weight of leather that shaped his striking silhouette into a figure of fear and yet was as much a restraint as it was a suit of armour, he is not so threatening.

_If I were an idiot._

But she is not, and she will know better than to believe him harmless. The leather, the steel, they formed a cruel exoskeleton that was easy enough to remove in the end, but far deeper runs the remorseless stuff of a creature for whom the only impulse – the only _imperative_ – is to obey and to fight and obey, again and again until the long night claws him back for itself once more.

Idly Natasha ponders the nature of that darkness, if he spent those years in another kind of incarceration, tugged and picked at by the kind of sharp-edged nightmares that find their way into her own dreams sometimes. Or was it different? Was it something more merciful, a deeper, sweeter sleep than any he’ll be lucky enough to know again?

(Lucky. And free. Having made the bargain herself – having balanced upon the same knife’s edge with a choice before her, having chosen and chosen and chosen until one day they stopped asking it of her, though she will never stop asking it of herself, she is perhaps uniquely placed in the grand schemes of the gods to venture a guess that he will not look for _choice_ when he wakes up.)

_What will you look for, when morning comes?_

_Will it be your masters? Or will you look for him, with his faith and his conviction?_

_How could you not? How could you fail to look for that light?_

Steve fills up the room with it, though he is tired and wounded by all that’s gone before. Bringing Barnes in had taken everything, takes more with it now, and Steve is hurt deeply in a way that the past months have done nothing to heal. Still, he is a rock of faith, and though sometimes he seems to find it hard to believe that Bucky is alive, that his old friend is here in body at least, he is unwavering in the belief that somewhere in that sleeping figure his friend’s mind remains too.

They will have to see. It shouldn’t be so easy, she thinks, to give back what was taken from him. To reach in and restore what was torn out at the root – it would be a simpler thing to sow a meadow in salted earth than to reconnect some of those lost memories. It should be impossible, though she gave up on absolutes a long time ago: what was taken was never meant to be returned, and it is hard enough to believe that her erstwhile employers, worn-thin as they are with patching up their worldwide reputation, have the resources to spare for working miracles.

And yet, after all, Natasha has seen miracles. That Barnes even survived is one. She has spoken with alien gods and wielded powers that could shake the stars from the sky; fought in wars waged by men who simply refused mortality and she keeps vigil now with a ghost. The realms of possibility stretch thin and what remains are lives woven from the same implausible threads as fairytales. Her own life is an impossibility from start to finish - they have that in common too. Are they not both knit from the stuff of legends?

_How does the story go again? A hundred years, a kiss, and death itself rewinds?_

_A single kiss was all it took to wake the sleeper in the tower, and perhaps faith will save the Winter Soldier._

Natasha is many things, but she is not that naïve.


	2. Chapter 2

_There is a story, among the circles she once trod, of a room where girls with pearly eyes like stars newly awoken in the night were taken apart, and remade in the image of an unkind god. There is a story where soft-skinned young things traded their milk teeth for the jaws of wolves, a story – more of a fairytale from the cold, now – of girls under red lights growing sharp and strong, pitted against the best Mother Russia had to offer in that room and hardening, sharpening, until they were more weapon than woman, but never less than both._

_And amidst all that, there is a story of a girl who never died._

The story is more than that, of course. She has forgotten more than most will ever know, lost more than most will ever have, but if she lives for a hundred years and then again she will never willingly forget how it was that she came to be who she is.

_Through fire, again and again. In gunfire and loss you were forged, in heart’s blood your hands were tempered, you left this world a girl but you were the wolf when they set you loose upon it again._

_That was how they did it, the architects of those memories you now know were not your own. All the false lives lived, the names and the legends and the lies: that was how their designs worked. They would build you a house of cards from those lies and you would repeat them again and again until you believed them, but the cards would always fall the same way, in the end. That is how the story goes._

(It is more of a horror story than a true legend, and nowhere is it set in stone that stories must be lies.)

_You have built worlds out of deceit, but the world that built you is not one of them._

_You know lies, would tell yourself them until everything else was lost. You still do, sometimes, to see how they taste on your tongue. Familiar, mostly. You were too adept a student to forget – you played your part and performed your roles perfectly, until the real you, the real Natasha, fought back._

She wonders if he had fought, knows it does not matter.

The night took them both in the end.

 _And when the night falls you may be anything, even young again._ As Barnes sleeps away the days and chases rabbits through burnt-out husks of memory (she can see his eyes moving under closed lids, dancing in the depths of unconsciousness), Natasha could almost believe he was just another lost soldier brought in from the cold at last. Could almost believe that the years never passed and the war never ended and it is still winter somewhere, and one day she will be an old woman and let herself forget.

Almost.

The night ends, though, always, and it takes months and weeks and more hours than she would care to admit spent at his bedside, but with encouragement and stimulus and just about every trick in the S.H.I.E.L.D. corrective-psychology book, the broken connections in his mind begin to heal.

-

Natasha had been a little surprised to find that there actually was a ‘corrective-psychology’ book among the scattered resources at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ, but after the past few years she figures it shouldn’t have been that unexpected. Nor, in the end, does it prove that helpful: the guide is less a textbook and more a collection of field reports, provided by agents who at some point in their careers have had to break through programming, undo brainwashing or even, on one occasion, shatter the enchantment of a rogue god. Her own career has required all three of her – hers is the latter report, as a matter of fact – so there’s little the handbook can tell her that she doesn’t already know.

She finds her own file after flicking through the book on the way back to Barnes’ room, and snorts at the crossed-out graffiti that’s appeared underneath the heading

_Cognitive Recalibration  
 ~~(fucking deck them).~~_

The handwriting is familiar enough: Clint's still sour about being a cautionary tale.


	3. Chapter 3

Slowly, carefully, they let Barnes retrace his steps through memory and time to piece back together what was burned away.

Some things are gone forever, of course. There’s no getting back what Hydra had scourged from the inside of his skull, and it shouldn’t fall to Natasha to point out that maybe that’s a good thing, that if they want Bucky Barnes back it may prove all the better if some of the acts he committed as the Winter Soldier remain lost. But it does, and she sees the way Steve’s jaw settles firmly against her words. He won’t even countenance that the Soviet legend and his old friend could be the same person, and she knows he won’t let Barnes believe it either. There will be no space for guilt in Bucky’s recovery, not with Steve at his side.

-

He observes fairly early on that he has gained a pair of shadows, one on either side of his narrow bed (he hates the bed, will rejoice to be shot of it when they discharge him, whenever that may be). It is always either one or the other, and on rare occasions both, but most often the captain, his frame spilling out of a chair too small to hold him comfortably. He had kept a patient watch in the first weeks but had seemingly exhausted himself, and now the Soldier is more likely to open his eyes and see the other dozing, his chin resting on his chest and a deep sadness etched into the planes of his face.

The Soldier does not dwell on that.

Sometimes, when Steve can be coaxed away to rest in a real bed, the Widow takes his place in this vigil they both seem to think necessary. There are two chairs near the bed but her customary place is across the room – on an enormous beanbag, of all things, where she will usually recline with a book and spare the barest of glances for her charge throughout the night.

The Soldier knows next to nothing about her, but he knows to assume she relaxes her guard during those quiet hours would be to make a grave mistake. She is unwaveringly, eerily alert at all times; once, he had erroneously thought she slept, only to find when he edged across the bed to check that her eyes had flown open and were boring into him with pure jade-coloured disapproval. He hadn’t tried to move when she was around after that.

(There is something familiar about those eyes, the way they glimmer in the half-light like the gaze of some patient feline…the way they miss nothing. He does not know her, would know if he did...he is almost certain he would know. But, then his certainty counts for nothing anymore, and that is the only truth he can hold to now.)

-

He has no words to spare for her when he is awake, only the occasional resentful glance – as if her mere presence is ruining his whole day. While Natasha is sure he has all _sorts_ of exciting plans that she’s keeping him from, confined to that bed as he is, she’s also sure she doesn’t much care.

Until, on one of the few occasions he displays reasonable lucidity, Barnes speaks to her, and she realises it’s less about her getting in the way and more that she’s irritating his pride.

“I don’t need babysitting,” he says somewhat gruffly, casting a dark scowl toward the corner of the room where Natasha has taken up her watch. She merely shifts in her seat and rolls her neck, easing tense muscles and making it abundantly clear that she could not care less; while Steve is resting, she will not leave Bucky alone.

She’s not even sure why she’s doing this anymore, but somehow she has managed to invest herself in his recovery.

He’s doing well, all things considered. He remembers who he was, when he truly was young, and he remembers how he came to no longer be that person. He has lifetimes buried within him and the hardest part is finding the way back to them, and sometimes she wonders what else he might find, if he ever did.

“Think of me as a nightlight,” the corner of her mouth curves in a lazy smile. “Just keeping away the bogeyman.”

-

_The lifetimes trapped in Barnes’ head are not his alone. You learn this, one night, when memory and nightmare collide._


	4. Chapter 4

He’s dreaming again. She had been drifting, her book slipping from between her fingers, when she hears him moan a little in his sleep and shifts upright.

There’s no one there – no ominous figure leaning over him, nothing disturbing the perfect stillness of the night save the pitter-patter of silvery rain against the windows and the rustle of sheets as he tosses restlessly in his bed, muttering wordless protestations against the nightmares that press close, dragging harsh gasps from his throat. Slowly, carefully, Natasha approaches, reaching out with one hand to brace it against his left shoulder.

"Barnes," the low urgency in her voice has him stirring again, but he does not wake. There's pain in his features now, visible even in the dim light slanting in through the shuttered blinds, and she redoubles her efforts to rouse him.

_"Bucky."_

His eyes fly open, his chest heaving with the onset of panic and before she can utter some banal reassurance, drive the night terrors away and offer him whatever scant comfort she can, he breathes her name and Natasha goes still, her heart thudding in her ears and something cold worming its way to her gut.

Not _that_ name. Not the name of her latest legend; only the most recent cover she has woven for herself like the silk of her namesake – though she still has some work to do in patching up what she tore down with her own hands when S.H.I.E.L.D. fell. No, not the name she gave him, the name by which she is almost universally known now.

The only name _he_ could possibly know.

He calls her by an older name, and she knows she never uttered it in his presence. No one has.

Unless…

_It should not be so easy._

She lets him grip her hand, lets him stare into her eyes as if to break contact now would be to slip away again, but her own thoughts are pinwheeling free into the night – older nights, longer nights, the darkness of decades in the cold and paths through frozen woods that end at sudden abysses because _they burned those memories out of her_. They went into her head and scoured the years from her skull, and she was never meant to know that they were gone.

And yet…the eyes that hold hers, blue-grey and desperate, they _know_ her. The mouth that holds _that_ name, holds it so gently, so disbelievingly, as if he had never thought to utter it again. As if so many years had passed with it growing dust in some unknown corner of his mind, because they had torched it from the known and let it wither at the root.

He looks up at her, and she does not know him.

But if he is who they say he is, and he is, then she knows that cannot be true. If he knows her, then she knows him, and this is no more than Karpov’s last laugh.

Just one more thing that was taken from her.

_That you could ever be whole is nothing more than a joke, a joke we played on you again and again and again until you more wished than believed it could be true._

Will she ever get herself back completely? Will she ever take back what they took first?

Would she ever know if she did?

_You said yourself, there are parts of you that you did not know you'd lost. Cards missing from the deck; a heart, or even two, they dealt you a hand and you were too busy playing the game to notice where the pieces didn't fit._

_You built yourself a life out of the cards you were dealt. You always have done. You can do nothing else._

_Different cards,_ she protests. _Different lives, now._

_But they will always fall, and when they do you build them up again and again. You will always play the hand you are given, and your cards will always fall in the same pattern. It will always be the same path for you, little Natalia._

How long, since she has heard that name spoken with anything but contempt…

_But a kiss was all it took._

_Can it be so easy?_

She has not been _Natalia_ for a long time; has almost forgotten how to be so and doubted she ever would be again, but when the Winter Soldier lifts the name up like a plea, his voice imbued all with the softness and terror and desperate numinous wonder of the lost, Natasha feels it take root in her memory like the echo of some half-remembered dream and part of her wonders how she could ever have been anything else.

"Bucky," she says, and, "James..." 

She leans in close, until her own reflection gleams in his eyes.

"How do you know me?"


End file.
